Wife of a Sailor

Winter is nature’s way of saying, “Up yours.”
~Robert Byrne

It’s time for the Thursday Thirteen again. If you have a Thursday Thirteen of your own, leave your website in the comments section and I’ll try my darndest to visit it

I can’t believe I’m still living in Michigan.  I thought for sure that I’d be in Washington by fall.  I am SO not wanting to deal with another Michigan winter.  So, in honor of the fact that it actually SNOWED today (no accumulation, thank God), I thought I’d find a fitting “Thursday Thirteen.”  So here it is:

13 Reasons I Hate Winter

1. It takes 5 minutes just to put on all your outwear so you can walk the 2 seconds to your car to turn it on so that it can warm up 10 minutes. Driving on a super-cold engine isn’t good. Then you go back inside, take off your outerwear, do something for five minutes (’cause if you leave your outerwear on too long you get too hot… and then it doesn’t feel like you are wearing anything when you go back outside) and then start putting it all back on.
2. It takes significantly longer to take the dogs outside. Greyhounds need jackets when humans need jackets. And Skah, the fuzzy wonder dog, looooooooves the snow (hey, his breed originated in the mountains!) and usually likes to take lots of time outside.
3. It is dark when I get up. I hate this. It makes me feel like I didn’t get enough sleep.
4. It is dark when I get home. I hate this, too. Makes me feel like it’s bedtime and I don’t get much accomplished.
5. Shoveling snow.  Back-breaking work. ‘Nuff said.
6. It’s tough to stay active in winter when you can’t go outside for more than 5 minutes because the -20 degree weather (yes, negative 20) means you start getting frostbite within minutes.
7. Snow starts flying in October.  It can fly through April. Heck, May has been known to have a 6-inch snowstorm.  That’s seven months of winter. It feels like it never ends.
8. Heating a house to 64-65 degrees (my normal temperature since the Greyhounds get too cold at the 62 I used to set the thermostat for) in sub-zero temps means $200+ electric bills a month.  My hands and feet are cold from October to May. In fact, my nails are generally a lovely purple color most of that time due to the iciness of them.
9. You know how pale Edward is in the Twilight series? He looks like he has a tan compared to how I look mid-February.  If I don’t wear foundation and blush, people will continually ask, “Oh my gosh… you look horrible… are you feeling okay?”  Stupid translucent skin (though I am lucky that it tans nicely in the summer).
10. Dirty snow. Everywhere.  Snow that doesn’t melt for 3+ months at a time gets realllly dirty along driveways and roads. It’s not pretty.  In fields, yes… but everywhere else, it’s pretty darn ugly a few days after it falls.
11. Other drivers. Seriously… if it is snowing/icing/sleeting… slow the &*$@ down! I can drive just fine in the snow. However, I’m not a miracle worker who can magically avoid all the idiots on the road who think that since they have an SUV or snow tires that that somehow makes them magically be able to drive 60 mph on an ice-covered road.
12. We have mostly deciduous trees around here. Which is absolutely gorgeous in the spring, summer and fall (which constitutes only 5 months of the year, COMBINED). Not so in the winter. The trees look dead with no leaves and combine that with the dirty snow and the fact that it gets dark at 5 p.m. and you have one very depressing landscape.
13. People who say that they’d rather deal with a Michigan winter than a Florida summer. Let’s look at this from a numbers point of view.  When I was in school, we considered “room temperature” to be 72 degrees.  This is the temperature that the majority of humans are comfortable at.  For the sake of ease, let’s call it 70 degrees. So a Florida summer generally is in the 90s and 100s.  Let’s be nice and say that with the heat index, it can easily get to 120 degrees.  That is a 50 degree deviation from the generally accepted “comfortable” temp.  The same 50 degrees the other way is 20 degrees.  We can easily reach a -20 in real temp with the windchill at -30 (two winters ago I remember us sitting at -18 for three days and we rejoiced when after two weeks, we finally went above zero).  Negative 30 is a 100 degree variation from the “comfortable” temp.  That is a variation equivalent of 170 degrees on the hot end!  So we deal with a wider range of deviation from “normal.” Yup, I’d rather deal with a hot summer than a freakin’ cold winter.  Now, I don’t like hot, humid summers at all (and Michigan has those too!) but I’d rather deal with that than the cold of winter.

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s Friday Funny! I have a hilarious video of the fuzzy pup Skah and how “brave” he was last night.